Iranian Older Peoples Emotional Well-being in Long-term Care

This paper investigates elderly people’s emotional well-being in long-term care environments. It is to explore how architecture influences their well-being in a place. While the literature on elderly people’s well-being in a place is growing, moving to long-term care environments still maintains as a challenge for majority of older people. This unwanted relocation in old age might cause psychological issues for older people. In order to have more spirituality as a key factor of emotional well-being, older people need to have a successful aging, but how do they age successfully? There are different approaches to successful aging, but this paper will mainly focus on Erikson’s psychosocial development model and Tornstam’s theory of gerotranscendence, as two of the main approaches to this issue. The population of Iran is getting old because of improvements in health system and the boost in the birth rate in 1980s, causing a wave in the population pyramid of Iran. Possibility of staying at home will probably decrease due to a number of reasons, such as: inappropriate level of safety in personal houses and lack of reliable 24 h in-place caregivers. This paper is looking for the way, in which older people’s well-being gets increased in nursing homes and how architecture can facilitate this process. As an early stage of an on-going research, this paper discusses the existing literature on the effects of nursing homes on elderly people’s emotional well-being with a particular emphasis on Iranian aging population.